LITERARY FESTIVAL
KATE MOSSE 20 November 10am
HER STORY An award-winning novelist, best known for the Languedoc trilogy and Burning Chambers series, Kate’s concerted foray into non-fiction captures the lives of over 1,000 influential women throughout history
she was actually a famous novelist in her day with 14 novels to her credit, hundreds of articles, many volumes of poetry, devotional work – and yet, there’s no trace of her at all in any of the books about Victorian literature,” says Kate. Queens is ‘a book about how history is made and who gets to decide what matters’, insists Kate. “It’s not just about whether women are known at the time, it’s about their legacy, and how we all keep saying that we owe so much of what we have to women of the past.” Too often men have been at the helm of gathering – and often gatekeeping – history, meaning women slip off the records. Recognising the past is crucial to understanding our present – and preventing history from repeating. “Everything we have as women is because somebody else fought for it – things didn’t just happen,” Kate claims. “And so, the recording of women’s history is about part of that same story, that we need to keep bringing women back into history where they were always present, so we can say to people: it doesn’t have to be like this. “History is a pendulum. It goes backwards and forwards. There’s an idea that things in the past were bad and things get better year on year, but we know that’s not true. We just need to look to Afghanistan to see that. Before the Taliban took back the country in August 2021, there were more women in the Afghan parliament than any other parliament in the world. That changed in a matter of days.” The experience of writing non-fiction, which Kate has interwoven throughout her career from its beginning, is distinct from fiction, she says: “They’re not different in terms of constructing a book, but the emotions are different. When you’re writing
The book is also a dialogue with the screenwriter in me, and the way I seek form amid the chaos
30 NOVEMBER 2022 CAMBSEDITION.CO.UK
Powered by FlippingBook